I took myself and my new iPhone 3GS out for a two night road trip. The iPhone really is a perfect travel companion. Here's some
travel-specific apps (and hardware) I used:
- Tweetie:
Twitter app
- There's nothing travel-specific about Tweetie except that it's a
really great Twitter app. And Twitter is great when travelling solo.
Keeps you from getting lonely, lets
your friends know where you are, good place to ask advice.
The photo and GPS/maps integration are great for travel notes.
- TripTrack:
all-in-one travel diary
- After my
last trip I wanted a geotagged photo diary. Sadly, TripTrack isn't
good enough. The photos are 240x240 toys, there's no way to put text
annotations in the log, no support for links to hotels, etc. The automatic geotagging is a little
handy, though, and I like the Web presentation. You can see my trip (access code is "p").
- MotionX
GPS: GPS tracker
- The most full-featured of the various iPhone GPS apps I've seen.
It works great but the GPS tracking mode kills the battery in 90
minutes. What I need is an app that does one GPS sample every 10
minutes.
- Nearby,
Where,
Geopedia,
Yelp:
geosearch
- All of these apps answer the question "what are some interesting
things near me"? It turns out the quality of the database is much more
important than the app itself and so both Nearby and Where are mostly
useless. Geopedia is pretty good in pointing out nearby Wikipedia
articles and Flickr photos, although the new
Geolocation API
means that Safari will do this itself soon. The Yelp app is the big
winner, Yelp's data about restaurants and hotels is
quite good.
- Offmaps: caching for offline
map viewing
- Surprisingly useful; you cache maps when you're on a good
network, then view them offline no matter how crappy the AT&T service is
wherever you happen to be. A full detail map of San Francisco is 130
megs. Like many mapping iPhone maps the data is from OpenStreetMap since the
Google Maps licensing doesn't allow caching.
- Griffin
iTrip Auto FM Transmitter with SmartScan
- FM transmitters are totally sucky, but if your expensive luxury
car doesn't include a $1.99 line-in jack on the car stereo it's the
only practical way to play music from the iPhone. The iTrip seems to
work particularly well as long as you're not in a big city; good
display, easy to use scanner, and the cable doesn't amplify GSM
chatter. Just ignore the dire warnings about airplane mode and
incompatible with the iPhone, it works fine.
